I train a few female volleyball players and I’ve been out to a few matches recently to watch them play. I finally brought along my 210 fps High-Speed camera and grabbed some videos. We had been talking a lot about vertical jumping and its (obvious) implications in their sport, and I was also curious about the biomechanics of the jump and arm swing on a spike. I found some good slow motion videos of professionals to complement my amateur videos. This is worth a look before we move forward and discuss it.

I’m a baseball player, and as such have a tendency to assume other overhead motions are mechanically the same. Throwing a baseball or softball requires lots of external and internal rotation Range of Motion, strength and speed. Those without these qualities simply don’t throw as hard as those who do. The volleyball strike, however, is mechanically different, though a lot of those qualities in hard throwers likely apply to hard hitters. While there are similarities, the two are pretty different at the moment of impact. I’m not going to compare the two side-by-side – that’s not the point of this article. Rather, I want to talk about the spike beginning with the liftoff from the legs, the arm’s path as it goes through the volleyball, and implications that path will have on the training and injury risks of the volleyball athlete. Read the rest of this entry »